Life has changed pretty fast for Drake. In just two years, the platinum rap start went from promising Toronto MC to one of hip-hop's top hitmakers. But the transition has taken a mental toll and it forms the basis of Drizzy's November 15 album, Take Care — and its pensive cover.

"The album is actually a story," Drake told MTV News while in New York last week for his "Saturday Night Live" appearance.

The inspiration for Take Care, the MC said, came from the mellowed-out track "Houstonaltantavegas," which appeared on his 2009 breakout mixtape So Far Gone. On the song, Drake created a fictional world, describing a love affair with an ambitious stripper who can't quite get out of the life. "It was a world that was very much real to me, but I created it in my mind. It was a world that, being a kid from Toronto, I used to look at from the outside and I used to be like, 'Man that looks crazy,' " he told us. "All those strip clubs and all those nightclubs and the drinks and the girls and the fame."

Through his rhymes, Drake inserted himself into a scene that he would soon come to know well in a life-imitating-art scenario. "I used to stare at this world through a glass window and, like, two to three years later, I become a king in that world," he said.

On his Take Care album cover, the rapper appears draped in gold jewelry and looking bothered, with his head hanging down. Hardly an image one would expect from a kid who has moved up the ranks in hip-hop, after selling more than a million copies of his debut album in 2010. Drake is clearly at odds with his fame.

"That's who's sitting on that album cover, that kid that's just somehow gone from his mom's basement in Toronto to becoming a king," he explained of the image. "That's what that album cover is about and there is a lot of deep thought involved in that 'cause you can go crazy doing this."

Does that mean Drake has already had his fill of the fame and the fortune? "No, I'm immersed in that lifestyle, but I'm not gonna let it consume me though," he said. "That's what the album is pretty much about, just staying sane, but maybe, maybe not really though. You have to listen to it."

What do you think of Drake's latest album cover? Tell us in the comments!